A New Beginning

I finally sat down today and finished a project which I had wanted to do for a long time. I partitioned my MacBook's hard drive, installed windows XP and made a dedicated mixing OS.

Unlike many people, I like to mix in a Windows environment - my DAW works better in windows, there are more free plugins, and many of my go-to applications/plugins are windows only.

The project went very well, no problems, no hang ups, and I had everything set up within a few hours. Now, I have the tools I like to use, and an environment that is dedicated to my work. For the past few months I had been working in OSX (which I love,) but I had not been able to use some of my precious plugins. :)

Now I know that some people will say that you should be able to work with whatever tools you are presented with - and I believe that I can, but I would argue that if the engineer is more comfortable with certain tools, then they don't get into the way of working, and he can work faster, more efficiently, and come up with better final product.

So, I'm happy now, and I'm very excited to mix a jazz session that I've had sitting around since last month.

Reading Material

In addition to sitting around, I have been catching up on my Internet browsing, and here are some interesting links I have come across... (I will probably discuss them more over the course of the week)

http://www.againstmonopoly.org/ - a group of writers who share their opinions on how intellectual property laws are misused

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/can-labels-still-sell-recorded-music.ars?utm_source=microblogging&utm_medium=pingfm&utm_term=Main%20Account&utm_campaign=microblogging - an article on what some consider the future of the music industry, a compulsory "music tax"

http://www.utterli.com/ - a strange video message based social networking system...?

http://www.othermusic.com/perl-bin/OM/index.cgi?ID=2585534.25538 - a cool brick and mortar record store in NYC that I'm going to have to visit soon

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html - a fantastic description of the "long tail" theory that everyone seems to be talking about

http://app.synclive.com/ - a very cool looking web service for the streaming of live concerts - you can stream your own concerts here!

http://www.atomkeep.com/ - a website that claims to be able to keep all of your social networking profiles/pages synced

Happy reading!

(picture courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/0olong/)

Being Home

Apparently, being home makes you want to work more - this is what I discovered over the past few days.

Though I truly enjoy sitting around doing nothing all day long, sleeping till 12, watching the West Wing, and playing Crysis, being home for spring break just makes me want to get back to school and get work done. Fortunately, I am in a major where I can work on what I want, not being burdened with an excess of busy work. But unfortunately, the nature of the program also means that much of my work I cannot do while at home. Lets face it, you either need someone to record, or a good set of monitors to mix on.

So here's to spring break, and also to the end of it.
(picture courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ception/)

I love charts!

So, I found this very interesting set of graphs here: (there's more on the second page too.)
http://www.verysmallarray.com/

They detail various differences between the top 100 songs on Billboard's 2008 charts and the top 100 popular on Pitchfork (an indie rock news/review community) for the same time frame. Since indie rock seems to be the vogue these days I found it interesting to see comparisons drawn between the "old" rating system of Billboard and the "new" Pitchfork reviews.

The first thing that stood out to me is that the average/median "age first musically active" of all artist in Pitchfork's list is 21. Very very strongly 21.I'm going to have to take issue with this. Now, I'm going to make an unfair generalization, and probably get in to a lot of trouble but... To me, the majority of music labeled "indie rock" sounds the same. It sounds like immature, angsty, recycled noise, often infused with poor arrangement, mixing, and intonation. It sounds like it was written by a 21 year old with no prior musical activity. Wait a minute... oh - it makes sense now.

The next thing I find amusing is how geographically concentrated all of pitchfork's top US pics are - a staggering portion come from the NYC/Long Island/Connecticut area.

The last thing is that interesting is how fragmented the genres are on pitchfork. There are 37 separate genres represented on pitchfork's list, and only 24 on Billboard. BUT, if you listen to all the songs from pitchfork, they sound (to me at least) like they all come from the same genre. It seems like the artists are labeling themselves extravagantly in order to be unique and fresh, yet all producing the same sounds.

I guess my point from this would be that even though the new music scene prides itself on individuality and diversity, to a certain extent, it still suffers from limitations similar the "old" major label system. Is this bad? Maybe. Does it matter? Probably not.

Down with copyright laws?

This segment on the Colbert Report really got me thinking about copyright openness and how I feel about the restrictions music artists place on their work.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Lawrence Lessig

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I subsequently went to Lessig's website (http://www.lessig.org/blog/) and downloaded his books as pdfs (for free). I have not read through them yet - I have skimmed them quickly though - but I have come to agree with him: our current copyright system is too restrictive. Now I'm not sure what the best solution is (though I am confident there is a problem). Creative Commons licensing seems to be heading in the right direction (http://creativecommons.org/), and many well known artists (in many different fields; music, photography, journalism, writing) are endorsing this direction by licensing their art with CC.

Now what reminded me about Lessig's segment on the Report was this page:
http://thru-you.com/#/videos/1/

The above link displays one man's amazing artistic combination of many Youtube videos all chopped up and sequenced together to make an entirely new product. Under traditional copyright, this type of thing would be walking a fine line between copyright infringement lawsuits and fair use.

In a digital age where people access the collective knowledge of the whole human population on their cell phones, a more uninhibited flow of information should be encouraged. Now, as a musician myself I understand the desire to protect copyright, and I also understand that music as a profession inherently requires the exchange of money. How should we progress in order that information can flow, creativity is encouraged - not stifled, and people can enjoy the creativity of others without worrying about being sued by the very people they admire?

I really don't know. But I know there needs to be changes made.